Pietro Belluschi
Pietro Belluschi (August 18, 1899 — February 14, 1994) was an Italian-born American architect, a leader of the Modern Movement in architecture, and was responsible for the design of over 1,000 buildings
Pietro Belluschi was born in Ancona, Italy in 1899. He grew up in Italy and served in the Italian armed forces during World War I when Italy was allied with Great Britain, France, and later the United States. Serving in the army he fought against the Austrians at the battles of Caporetto and Vittorio Veneto. After the war, Belluschi studied at the University of Rome, earning a degree in civil engineering in 1922.
Belluschi's architectural career began as a draftsman in a Portland, Oregon firm. He achieved a national reputation within about 20 years, largely for his 1947 aluminum-clad Equitable Building. In 1951 he was named the dean of the MIT School of Architecture and Planning, where he served until 1965, also working as collaborator and design consultant for many high-profile commissions, most famously the 1963 Pan Am Building. He won the 1972 AIA Gold Medal.
He moved to the United States in 1923, despite speaking no English, and finished his education—as an exchange student on a scholarship—at Cornell University with a second degree in civil engineering. Instead of returning to Italy, he worked briefly as a mining engineer in Idaho earning $5 per day, but he then joined the architectural office of A. E. Doyle in Portland, living in Goose Hollow. He remained in the U.S., as friends in Italy had cautioned him to not return home because of the rise to power of Benito Mussolini and the Fascist government.
At Doyle's office, Belluschi rose rapidly, soon becoming chief designer. After Doyle died in 1928, the firm took him into partnership in 1933. By 1943, Belluschi had assumed control of the firm by buying out all the other partners and was practicing under his own name.
In 1951, Belluschi became Dean of the architecture and planning school at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a position he held until 1965. When he accepted the position of dean and moved to Massachusetts, he transferred his office in Portland to the architecture firm Skidmore, Owings and Merrill. The move reduced his annual income from $150,000 to a salary of $15,000, but was prompted by health concerns attributable to the long hours of managing his office while still designing buildings.
Belluschi emerged as a leader in the development of American Modern architecture, with the design of several buildings reflecting the influence of the International Style and his awareness of the technological opportunities of new materials. Most important was the Equitable Building (1944–47) in Portland, Oregon: a concrete frame office block clad in aluminum, and considered the first office building with a completely sealed air-conditioned environment.
Belluschi's churches and residences differed from his commercial works. Although of Modern design, they fit within the development of the Pacific Northwest regional Modern idiom as they frequently used regional materials (particularly wood) and were often integrated with their suburban or rural sites.
Belluschi was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1952. In 1953, he was elected into the National Academy of Design as an Associate member, and became a full member in 1957. He served as a presidential appointee on the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts from 1950 to 1955. He was a Fellow in the American Institute of Architects (AIA), and was awarded the AIA Gold Medal, the highest award given by the institute, in 1972. He was awarded the National Medal of Arts by the National Endowment for the Arts in 1991 for his lifetime achievements. Belluschi was on the jury that selected the winning design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C.
After leaving MIT in 1965, he continued to work. Belluschi would design and consult on both buildings and issues surrounding urban planning. Pietro Belluschi was married first to Helen Hemmila on December 1, 1934, the mother of his two sons, Peter (b. 1939) and Anthony (b. 1941). After her death in 1962, he married in 1965 Marjorie (1920-2009). Pietro Belluschi died in Portland on February 14, 1994.
Works
555 California Street, as consultant to Wurster, Benardi and Emmons and Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, San Francisco, California, 1969
Alice Tully Hall at the Juilliard School within the Lincoln Center, New York City, 1963–1969
Baxter Hall and Collins Hall, Willamette University, Salem, Oregon, 1947
Belluschi Building, Portland Art Museum (NRHP), 1932
Bennington College Library, Bennington, Vermont, 1957–1958
Breitenbush Hall, Oregon State Hospital, Salem (NRHP)
Burkes House, Portland, 1947
Camp Namanu, Sandy, Oregon, Uncle Toby's Story House (1932), Blue Wing Lodge (1936), Guardians' Lodge (1929), Kiwanis Lodge (1931), All being restored and updated as of 2010.
Cathedral of Saint Mary of the Assumption, San Francisco (collaborating with Pier Luigi Nervi and others), 1971
Centennial Tower and Wheeler Sports Center, George Fox University, 1991
Central Lutheran Church, Eugene, Oregon, 1959
Central Lutheran Church, Portland, 1951
Chapel of Christ the Teacher, University of Portland
Chapel, River View Cemetery, Portland, 1942
Church of the Christian Union, Rockford, Illinois, 1964-1965
Church of the Redeemer (Baltimore), 1958
Clark Art Institute, with The Architects Collaborative, Williamstown, Massachusetts, 1973
Commonwealth Building in Portland
Emmanuel Lutheran Church, Longview, Washington, 1946
Equitable Building, Portland (NRHP), 1948
Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, Portland Branch, 1950
First Lutheran Church, Boston, 1954–1957
First Methodist Church, Duluth, Minnesota, 1962–1969
First Presbyterian Church, Cottage Grove, Oregon (NRHP), 1948
Goucher College Center, 1960
Hoffman Columbia Plaza, now Unitus Plaza, Portland, Oregon, 1966
Immanuel Lutheran Church, Silverton, Oregon, 1966
Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall, Baltimore, Maryland, 1978–1982
Lacamas Summer Home, Camas, Washington
Library Building (now Smullin Hall) at Willamette University, Salem, Oregon, 1938
Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall, with Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, San Francisco, 1980
Marion County Courthouse, Salem, Oregon, 1954
Murray Hills Christian Church, Beaverton, Oregon (1987–89)
One Boston Place, with Emery Roth & Sons, Boston, Massachusetts, 1970
One Financial Center, Boston, 1983
Oregonian Building, Portland, 1947
Pacific Building, Portland, 1926
Pacific Telephone and Telegraph Company Building, southern addition, Portland, 1926
Pan Am Building, Belluschi and Walter Gropius as design consultants to Emery Roth & Sons, New York City, 1963
Percy L. Menefee Ranch House, Yamhill, Oregon, 1948
Peter Kerr House, Gearhart, Oregon, 1941
Portsmouth Abbey School campus, Portsmouth, Rhode Island. Belluschi designed 14 of the 27 buildings on campus between 1960 and 1991.
Psychology Building, Reed College, Portland, 1947–1948
Public Service Building, Portland, Oregon, 1927
Rohm and Haas Corporate Headquarters, with George M. Ewing Co., Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1964
Sacred Heart Church, Lake Oswego, Oregon, 1949
St. Philip Neri Catholic Church, Portland, 1952
St. Thomas More Catholic Church, Portland, 1940
Sweeney, Straub and Dimm Printing Plant, Portland (NRHP), 1946
Temple Adath Israel, with Charles Frederick Wise, Merion, Pennsylvania, 1956–1957
Temple B'rith Kodesh, Rochester, New York, 1959–1963
Temple Israel, Swampcott, MA, 1953-1956
The Alice Tully Hall at the Juilliard School within the Lincoln Center, New York City, 1963–1969
Trinity Episcopal Church, Concord, Massachusetts, dedicated October 6, 1963
Trinity Lutheran Church, Walnut Creek, CA, 1954
University of Virginia School of Architecture, 1970
US Bancorp Tower, as consultant to Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, Portland, 1983
Woodbrook Baptist Church, 1970
YWCA building, Salem, 1954
Zion Lutheran Church, Portland (NRHP), 1950
Grady Clay
Grady Clay (1916 – March 17, 2013) was an American journalist specializing in landscape architecture and urban planning.
Clay was an honorary member of both the American Institute of Architects (AIA) and the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) and was editor of Landscape Architecture Magazine" from 1960 to 1985. He also was chairman of the jury that judged the design competition for the United States' Vietnam Veterans Memorial, was the Urban Affairs editor for the Louisville Courier-Journal, and provided a commentary segment, "Crossing the American Grain" which aired locally during National Public Radio's Morning Edition. In 1999, he was awarded the Olmsted Medal by ASLA. Clay also is a former president of the American Planning Association (formerly the American Society of Planning Officials) and was awarded an honorary doctorate by Emory University.
In an article from the July 2006 'Landscape Architecture Magazine, editor J. William "Bill" Thompson noted that Clay "once forecast that the design profession with the best information was going to dominate the others –and he wasn't at all sure that landscape architecture had the capacity to generate the best information".
Before Grady Clay was editor of LAM, most articles were written by professional landscape architects; during his tenure, many contributions were by professional writers without architecture credentials. He published Ian McHarg's ecological planning research, and covered areas that included use of native species for plantings, landscape sculpture and adventure playgrounds.
Clay grew up in Atlanta, Georgia, the son of an eye surgeon.
After 1939, Clay lived in Louisville, Kentucky, and was still actively writing and gardening. He was a founder of the Crescent Hill Community Association, a neighborhood association. Most of his professional papers went to the University of Louisville. His journals and other papers going back to 1939 are in the archives of the Loeb Library at Harvard.
Clay died in Louisville, on March 17, 2013, at the age of 96.
Publications
Close-Up: How to Read the American City 1974
Being a disquisition upon the origins, natural disposition and occurrences in the American scene of alleys ... a hidden resource 59 pages, 1978, ASIN B0006CY1F2
Water and the Landscape (as editor), 193 pages, McGraw-Hill Education (February 1, 1979), ISBN 978-0-07-036190-4
Right Before Your Eyes: Penetrating the Urban Environment, 241 pages, American Planning Association (October 1987), ISBN 978-0-918286-47-5
Real Places: An Unconventional Guide to America's Generic Landscape. 322 p., 100 halftones, 16 line drawings. 8½ × 9¼ 1994, ISBN 978-0-226-10946-6
Crossing the American Grain 2003, ISBN 978-1-884532-51-1
Garrett Eckbo
Garrett Eckbo (November 28, 1910 – May 14, 2000) was an American landscape architect notable for his seminal 1950 book Landscape for Living.
He was born in Cooperstown, New York to Axel Eckbo, a businessman, and Theodora Munn Eckbo. In 1912, the family moved to Chicago, Illinois. After Eckbo's parents divorced, he and his mother relocated to Alameda, California where they struggled financially while he grew up. After Eckbo graduated from high school in 1929, he felt a lack of ambition and direction and went to stay with a wealthy paternal uncle, Eivind Eckbo, in Norway. It was during his stay in Norway that he began to focus on his future. Once he returned to the U.S., he worked for several years at various jobs saving money so that he could attend college.
After attending Marin Junior College for a year, he enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley where he majored in landscape architecture.
While Eckbo was at Berkeley he was influenced by two of the program's faculty members, H. Leland Vaughan and Thomas Church, who inspired him to move beyond the formalized beaux-arts style that was popular at the time. The Beaux Arts-movement is defined as being carefully planned, richly decorated and being influenced by classical art and architecture. Eckbo graduated with a B.S. in landscape architecture in 1935 and subsequently worked at Armstrong Nurseries in Ontario near Los Angeles where he designed about a hundred gardens in less than a year. After working at the Nurseries, he was restless to expand his creative horizons and entered Harvard University's Graduate School of Design by way of a scholarship competition, which he won.
Beginning his studies at Harvard, Eckbo found that the curriculum followed the Beaux-Arts method and was similar to the one at Berkeley but more rigidly entrenched. Eckbo, along with fellow students Dan Kiley and James Rose resisted and began to "explore science, architecture, and art as sources for a modern landscape design." Eckbo began to take architecture classes with the former Bauhaus director Walter Gropius, who was then head of the architecture department while continuing to take classes in the landscape architecture department. Gropius and Marcel Breuer introduced Eckbo to the idea of the social role in architecture, the link between society and spatial design.
Eckbo was also influenced by the works of several abstract painters, including Wassily Kandinsky, László Moholy-Nagy and Kasimir Malevich. Eckbo would convey a sense of movement in his designs by the layering and massing of plants as inspired by the artists' paintings.
After receiving his MLA degree from Harvard in 1938, Eckbo returned to California where he worked in the San Francisco Office of the Farm Security Administration. He designed camps for the migrant agricultural workers in California's Central Valley. He applied his modernist ideas to these camps attempting to improve the workers' living environments. "The Grapes of Wrath' was our bible," he said of John Steinbeck's 1939 novel about farmers dislocated by the dust bowl. The F.S.A. was a remarkable experience because it had the really creative atmosphere a public agency can have if it's not inhibited by some frustrating force."
Those major organizational plantings of Chinese elms, cottonwoods, mulberries, sycamores and other hardy species were softened with magnolias, oaks and olives for shade and almond and plum trees for color. The landscape architect sees nothing extraordinary about going to such trouble for the dispossessed. "You were conscious of social problems that existed, and you tried to think of ways to improve them," he said.
During World War II, the agency shifted its focus to housing for defense workers. Mr. Eckbo designed site plans for 50 such settlements on the West Coast. But peace brought a different public attitude. "There were products we wanted to buy, things we wanted to do, a great outflow of energy, demand and desire. Prosperity is bad for morale," he said. "It makes us greedy."
Mr. Eckbo had a leading hand in planning what many scholars consider the postwar period's finest subdivision scheme, the 256-acre Ladera Housing Cooperative near Palo Alto. But the project was never fully realized without Federal Housing Authority financing, which was probably withheld because the community was racially integrated.
In 1940 Eckbo joined with his brother–in-law, Edward Williams to form the firm Eckbo and Williams. Five years later Robert Royston joined the firm.
In 1946 Eckbo resettled in Los Angeles to take advantage of its growing opportunities for private practice. Never a puritan, he threw himself with gusto into defining the landscape of a new American dream. "L.A. is larger, looser, a place of freer movement socially than the Bay Area," he said. "The years I spent there were the best of my professional life."
Mr. Eckbo's eagerness to experiment during the 1950s was epitomized by his theatrical Beverly Hills swimming pool design for the owner of Cole of California, the bathing suit company. The landscape architect cantilever a steel beam spanning the width of the pool to support a masonry wall and a series of concrete diving platforms that allowed models to swim under the backdrop unnoticed and then emerge like Esther Williams from the deep.
In other projects, Mr. Eckbo advanced the quintessential California mode of indoor-outdoor living, casual recreation and the flexible use of space. "In the landscape profession," Mr. Eckbo explained, "small gardens are not seen as our highest aspiration. If you can do a 50-acre park, it must be more important. But for me the private garden has always been a laboratory for developing new ideas and concepts. Any family that has a quarter-acre backyard has got a real project. Any improvement of any space is a step forward."
Many of Eckbo's gardens accompanied well known leading modernist architect housing design, including Raphael Soriano, Richard Neutra and Robert Alexander.
In 1956, the Aluminum Company of America (ALCOA) asked Eckbo to create a garden containing large amounts of aluminum, for the company's publicity purposes. Aluminum had been widely used during the war years as a component in airplane manufacture, but ALCOA was interested in promoting the metal's peacetime use as well.
In 1963 he returned to Berkeley to head the department of landscape architecture where he had been a student.
The very successful firm of Eckbo, Royston and Williams designed hundreds of projects including residential gardens, planned community developments, urban plazas, churches and college campuses.
He would eventually form the highly successful firm Eckbo, Dean, Austin and Williams in 1964, which in 1973, officially adopted the moniker, EDAW. Guided by a progressive vision of the leadership role of landscape architecture, EDAW became involved in sustainable planning at the regional scale as early as the 1960s when the firm created the California Urban Metropolitan Open Space Plan for the State.
In a period in history when suburban sprawl was ascendant, EDAW’s open space plan for the state of California was as innovative as it was provocative. The very idea of an ‘open space plan’ was a novel one. The firm drew up plans to preserve open spaces in danger of encroachment on the fringes of the greater Los Angeles-San Diego, Palm Springs, San Francisco Bay and Lake Tahoe areas. In addition to protected county, state and federal lands existing at the time, EDAW’s plan identified a further 330,000 acres for protection. In strong language, it warned against the automobile and foretold the climate crisis. "A new ethical attitude about land use is needed," intoned EDAW’s report, "in order to protect the environment for everyone’s benefit."
EDAW also began to work internationally, with projects in New Delhi, India (Lodi Park and the Ford Foundation Headquarters) and Osaka, Japan (Civic Center) among other locations worldwide. Eckbo famously said: "Design shall be dynamic, not static. Design shall be areal, not axial. Design shall be three dimensional, people live in volumes, not planes."
Growth in the firm continued apace in the 1970s and ‘80s, with new satellite offices in Alexandria, Virginia, and Atlanta, Georgia. In 1979 Eckbo left EDAW, the firm he helped to found. EDAW was acquired by AECOM Technology Corporation in 2005, whose work continuously strives to include cross-disciplinary work and link environmental and social goals to improve quality of life.
Leaving the firm in 1979, Eckbo first formed the firm Garrett Eckbo and Associates and finally Eckbo Kay Associates with Kenneth Kay. Throughout Eckbo's career he maintained his vision of the interaction of art and science to create environments that were functional and livable, while maintaining the social, ecological and cultural approach to design.
In 1964, he was elected into the National Academy of Design as an Associate member, and became a full Academician in 1994. In 1968, he signed the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War.
He received numerous awards, including UC Berkeley's College of Environmental Design Distinguished Alumnus of 1998, the American Society of Landscape Architects Medal of Honor in 1975, the Architectural League of New York's gold medal in 1950 and the American Institute of Architect's merit award in 1953. In 1970, he won an American Society of Landscape Architects' merit award for Lodi Park in New Delhi, India.
"Art emotionalizes the intellect. Science intellectualizes the emotions. Together, they bring order to nature and freedom to man," he wrote in his 1969 book, "The Landscape We See."
"Today, one finds the center of city or town only by the increasing height of buildings, the increasing clamor of lights and signs, and the increasing congestion of traffic," he wrote. "We still build temples and palaces and many other splendid structures, but they are lost in the modern urban jungle."
"Over the years I've done a lot of flying across the country," he said in an interview to Martin Filler of the New York Times, "and from an airplane it looks as if nobody knew what they were doing or where they were building. There's a near total absence of physical community in America today, no sequence of qualitative connections and experiences. What we landscape architects are about is to try to bring some intelligence to that pattern."
Mr. Eckbo's great success in doing just that is evident in the more than 1,000 highly varied schemes he produced for clients ranging from migrant farm workers in California's Central Valley to Gary Cooper in Beverly Hills. But despite his important role in creating a distinctive new style of American landscape design during the expansive postwar years—when his lively, innovative gardens were the horticultural equivalents of the architecture and furniture of Charles and Ray Eames—Mr. Eckbo is still not as widely known outside certain practical and academic architectural and landscape circles, although his students and colleagues bear testament to his teachings and humanity.
Other books by Eckbo include "Landscape for Living" and "Urban Landscape Design."
Linda Jewell, professor of landscape architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, where Eckbo taught, said Eckbo's books always contained numerous illustrations of his observations and theoretical positions. Some of the illustrations reflected actual projects, others were proposals that Eckbo thought should be real, she said. "He was always an advocate for the underclass," she said. "Everything he did had a social agenda behind it."
Eckbo died on May 14, 2000 after a stroke. He was survived by his wife, Arline, of Oakland; daughters Marilyn Kweskin and Alison Peper of Los Angeles; six grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
Selected Projects
1935: Landscape design for architect Edwin Lewis Snyder, Berkeley, CA
1938-44: Housing for migrant workers in California, Arizona and Texas
1946: Park Planned Homes (architect: Gregory Ain), Altadena, CA
1947-48: Community Homes (architect: Gregory Ain), Reseda, CA (unbuilt)
1947: Ladera Cooperative (architects: John Funk and Joseph Allen Stein), Palo Alto, CA
1948: Avenel Homes (architect: Gregory Ain), Los Angeles, CA
1948: Mar Vista Housin] (architect: Gregory Ain), Los Angeles, CA
1952: Alcoa Forecast Garden (Eckbo residence), Los Angeles, CA
1962: Long-range development plan for the University of New Mexico
1964-68: Union Bank Plaza (architect: Harrison & Abramovitz), Los Angeles, CA
1966: Fulton Mall, Fresno, California
1968: Lodhi Garden (architect: Joseph Allen Stein), New Delhi, India
1970: Tucson Community Center, Tucson, AZ
Teaching
Eckbo taught at the School of Architecture at the University of Southern California from 1948-56. Among his students was architect Frank Gehry. Gehry credits Eckbo and Simon Eisner, who taught city planning, in encouraging him to follow his "liberal political do-gooder leanings" and apply to Harvard Graduate School of Design for graduate work in city planning: "they also knew I wasn't interested in doing rich guys' houses and that I would be more emotionally inclined toward low-cost housing and planning.”
He was the chairman of the Department of Landscape Architecture at UC Berkeley from 1963-69.
Eckbo's social inquiry techniques, environmental, landscape and living teachings have continued to exert influence internationally through the practice of the firms he founded, including the large and international EDAW / AECOM and international students at UC Berkeley, such as Mexican architect and landscape architect Mario Schjetnan.
At the request of UC Berkeley's Institute of Governmental Studies, Eckbo wrote "Public Landscape," ranking architectural and planning successes and failures from the public arena.
In 1997, the UC Berkeley Art Museum mounted a "Garrett Eckbo: Landscape for Living" exhibit.
Though he gave up designing when he turned 80, he continued to write for several years after, including “People in a Landscape,'a summation of humanistic principles that at the time in the decade of the late 1990s may have seemed novel to a generation that grew up in a very different climate for design in the public realm than the social and economic transformations. Eckbo lived through the Great Depression and post war period.
Richard Howard Hunt
Richard Howard Hunt (born September 12, 1935) is an American sculptor. In the second half of the 20th century, he became "the foremost African-American abstract sculptor and artist of public sculpture." Hunt, the descendant of enslaved people brought through the port of Savannah from West Africa, studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the 1950s, and while there received multiple prizes for his work. He was the first African American sculptor to have a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 1971. Hunt has created over 160 public sculpture commissions in prominent locations in 24 states across the United States, more than any other sculptor.
With a career that spans seven decades, Hunt has held over 150 solo exhibitions and is represented in more than 100 public museums across the world. Hunt has served on the Smithsonian Institution's National Board of Directors. Hunt's abstract, modern and contemporary sculpture work is notable for its presence in exhibitions and public displays as early as the 1950s, despite social pressures for the obstruction of African-American art at the time. Barack Obama said "Richard Hunt is one of the greatest artists Chicago has ever produced."
Notable Works
Arachne (1956)
Steel Bloom, Number 10 (1956)
Hero Construction (1958)
The Chase (1965)
Harlem Hybrid (1976)
I Have Been to the Mountain (1977)
Jacob's Ladder (1978)
From the Sea (1983)
Slowly toward the North (1984)
From the ground Up (1989)
Freeform (1993)
Flintlock Fantasy or the Promise of Force (1991-1996)
Flight Forms (2001)
We Will (2005)
Swing Low (2016)
Scholar's Rock or Stone of Hope or Love of Bronze (2014-2020)
Costantino Nivola
Costantino Nivola (July 5, 1911 – May 6, 1988) was an Italian sculptor. The Museo Nivola in Orani, Sardinia, hosts the largest collection of his works.
Nivola was born and grew up in Orani, a small village in Sardinia. His family was very poor. As a young adolescent, he worked as an apprentice stonemason in the local building industry.
In Sassari, with the painter Mario Delitala, also from Orani, Nivola had his artistic start, and soon the two worked together for the decoration of some spaces in the local university.He then moved to the Italian mainland, and in 1931 entered the ISIA, the state institute for Artistic Industry in Monza, near Milan. His first official exhibitions are recorded in this period; among many works, notably he produced some xylography, a form of art that would have remained a characteristic expression of Sardinia.
Nivola then started frequenting France (and Paris in particular, where he met Emilio Lussu during his clandestinity), establishing contacts with artists from other countries. Supposedly here he first met his wife, Ruth Guggenheim.
In 1936 he entered the graphics' division of Olivetti, then one of the most important industrial firms in the nation, but in 1939, after Fascism issued racial laws, to protect his wife, he left Italy for France first and the U.S.A. later (Long Island).
Here, in 1940 he became the artistic director for "Interiors" and "Progressive Architecture". In time he became a close friend of Le Corbusier and not without his influences and reflections, Nivola defined his quite surprising technique called "sand-casting". Nivola then provided works for Olivetti showroom in New York (a famous sand-cast relief wall), Mutual Hartford INSURANCE COMPANY (Connecticut), Harvard University, McCormick Plaza Exposition Center (Chicago) and Yale University.
In 1954 Nivola became a professor and the director of the "Design Workshop" at Harvard University, while the American Institute of Graphic Arts assigned him ITS CERTIFICATE of Excellence. His academic work increased with other teachings, like in Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Den Haag, Netherlands.
In 1972 the American Academy of Arts and Letters admitted Nivola as its first non-American member. In 1978 the University of California, Berkeley gave him a chair at its Art Department.
He died of a heart attack in Southampton Hospital on Long Island, New York, in 1988.
Nivola's sand casting has been briefly described as a bas-relief sculpture in concrete. Landscape architect Michael Gotkin recently said that Nivola had taken the traditional Mediterranean essence of the ancient graffiti and translated it into modern terms. Others suggested that his work expresses a seamless integration of sculpture and architecture.
He produced murals and reliefs for (or together with) a variety of architects including Eero Saarinen, Percival Goodman, Antonin Raymond, Bernard Rudofsky, Richard G. Stein, Carl Stein and others.
James Rosati
James Rosati (1911, Washington, Pennsylvania 1911- 1988, New York City) was an American abstract sculptor.
Born near Pittsburgh, Rosati moved to New York in 1944, where he befriended fellow sculptor Philip Pavia. He was a charter member of the Eighth Street Club (the Club) and the New York School of abstract expressionists. Rosati was among the participants in the 9th Street Art Exhibition and the subsequent Stable Gallery shows. He met and became friends with painters Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline, and sculptor David Smith. He was awarded the Mr and Mrs Frank G. Logan Art Institute Prize for sculpture in 1962 and a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 1964. A 1969 show at Brandeis University lifted his career to new heights. He had other solo exhibitions and was in numerous group shows.
Rosati is perhaps best known for his sculptures in stone from the 1960s, and the stainless steel Ideogram that stood over 23 feet tall on the plaza between Towers 1 and 2 of the World Trade Center in New York City. About forty monumental pieces of sculpture are located in the United States and around the world.
Public Collections
Albright-Knox Art Gallery (Buffalo, New York)
Carnegie Museum of Art (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania)
Empire State Collection (Empire State Plaza, Albany, New York)
Grounds for Sculpture (Hamilton, New Jersey)
Honolulu Museum of Art (Honolulu, Hawaii)
Museo della Scultural Contemporanea - Matera (Matera, Italy)
National Gallery of Art (Washington, D. C.)
Whitney Museum of American Art (New York City)
Yale University Art Gallery (New Haven, Connecticut)
Hideo Sasaki
Hideo Sasaki (25 November 1919 - 30 August 2000) was an influential American landscape architect.
Hideo Sasaki was born in Reedley, California, on 25 November 1919. He grew up working on his family's California truck farm, and harvesting crops on Arizona farms. He began his college studies at the University of California, Berkeley during the time of World War II. Owing to his Japanese descent, he was forced into the Poston internment camp in Arizona. He was able to leave the camp upon volunteering to work as a farm hand in Sterling, Colorado. Soon after the war, he moved to Denver, Colorado where he met his wife, Kisa, a graduate of the University of Colorado. Sasaki then moved to the University of Colorado where he received Bachelor of Fine Arts and Landscape Architecture in 1946. In 1948 he graduated with a Master of Landscape Architecture from Harvard Design School. After graduation he returned to Illinois where he instructed for two years. For the next eighteen years, he became a professor and the chairman of the department of Landscape Architecture of the Harvard Graduate School of Design. In 1953, he founded Sasaki Associates, Incorporated in nearby Watertown, Massachusetts, where he was the president and chairman until 1980. He led the company's architects and planners in developing many noted commercial areas and corporate parks.
During his later years he lived with his family (wife and two daughters, Rin and Ann) in Lafayette, California. He died on 30 August 2000 in a hospital in Walnut Creek, California, shortly before his 81st birthday.
Sasaki helped to modernize the concepts of Landscape Architecture. He created a practical approach to designing a landscape. In his works, several characteristics are taken into account, such as the historical, cultural, environmental, and social use of the land. Sasaki became famous for developing this concept of interdisciplinary planning. In all of the sites that he developed, a balance is implemented into the design. One aspect that Sasaki Associates pays particular attention to is the environmental aspect of the land. They have taken part in creating several “green designs.” These designs are created to enhance or maintain the health of the environment. Some of the prominent examples can be viewed at the Utah State University Innovation Campus, The Virginia Biosphere, Walden Woods, and the Manulife Financial U.S. Operations Headquarters. Another facet of Sasaki's approach was the modernism that he worked into his college campus projects.
Major Projects
1957 - Foothill College, Los Altos Hills, California
1958 - Washington Square Village, Greenwich Village, New York City
1961 - Master plan for Sea Pines Resort, Hilton Head, South Carolina
1962 - Aerial view of Bell Labs Holmdel Complex, Holmdel Township, New Jersey
1962 - Bell Labs Holmdel Complex, Holmdel Township, New Jersey
1964 - John Deere World Headquarters, Moline, Illinois
1964 - One Maritime Plaza, San Francisco, California
1971 - One Shell Plaza, Houston, Texas
1977 - Urban design for Pearl Street Mall, Boulder, Colorado
1986 - Forrestal Village, Princeton, New Jersey
1990 - Waterfront Park, Charleston, South Carolina
1992 - Euro Disneyland in Paris, France
1999 - Master plan for The Arboretum at Penn State, State College, Pennsylvania
2006 - Performance Hall, Utah State University, Logan, Utah
2006 - Master plan for the Puerto Rico Convention Center District
2015 - Middlebury College Virtue Field House (donated by Ted Virtue)
Awards and Achievements
In 1961 President John F. Kennedy appointed Sasaki to the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts. He held this position until 1971, being re-appointed by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965. In 1971 he received the American Society of Landscape Architects Medal, the first person to do so. In 1973 he received the Allied Professions Medal from the American Institute of Architects. Sasaki was a member of CU-Boulder's four-member design review board for 33 years. He was Chairman of the department of landscape architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (1950-1968). He founded Sasaki Associates Inc. and was chairman and president of the board (1953-1980). He was a Juror for the Vietnam Memorial Competition in 1981, the Astronaut Memorial Competition in 1988 and the Peace Garden Competition in 1989. Sasaki was awarded the Centennial Medal for his impact on landscape architecture at the Harvard Design School, at a 1999 symposium on his work. In 1984 Sasaki was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Harry Weese
Harry Mohr Weese (June 30, 1915 – October 29, 1998) was an American architect, born in Evanston, Illinois in the Chicago suburbs, who had an important role in 20th century modernism and historic preservation. His brother, Ben Weese, is also a renowned architect.
Harry Weese grew up in this house in Kenilworth, Illinois.
Harry Mohr Weese was born on June 30, 1915 in Evanston, Illinois as the first son of Harry E. and Marjorie Weese. In 1919, the family moved to a house in Kenilworth, Illinois, where Harry would be raised. Weese was enrolled in the progressive Joseph Sears School in 1919. By 1925, Weese decided that he wanted to be either an artist or an architect.
After graduating from New Trier High School, Weese enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1933 to pursue a Bachelor in Architecture. Weese also took architecture classes at Yale University starting in 1936. Weese studied under Alvar Aalto at MIT and fraternized with classmates I.M. Pei and Eero Saarinen. As his schooling was at the height of the Great Depression, Weese eschewed studying the expensive historical revivals in favor of more affordable modern styles. In the summer of 1937, Weese toured northern Europe on a bicycle, fostering his appreciation for the modernist movement.
Upon his return to the United States, Weese was offered a fellowship at the Cranbrook Academy of Art through Eero Saarinen, whose father Eliel oversaw the school. There, he studied city planning, potter, and textiles while learning more about Modernist principles. He worked alongside other emerging Modern designers such as Ralph Rapson, Florence Knoll, and Charles Eames. Weese formed an architectural partnership in Chicago with classmate Benjamin Baldwin upon their graduation in 1940. He would later marry Baldwin's sister, Kitty.
Pentagon City Station, a typical stop on the Washington Metro, considered one of the best examples of brutalist style architecture.
Following the brief partnership, Weese joined the firm of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM). Soon after joining, however, Weese enlisted as an engineering officer in the United States Navy for World War II. Weese moved back to Chicago after the war in 1945 and rejoined SOM.
In 1947, Weese started his independent design firm, Harry Weese Associates. His first commissions, such as the Robert and Suzanne Drucker House in Wilmette, Illinois, were houses for family members and close associates. By the late 1950s, Weese began to receive major commissions. Although he continued to plan houses, Weese also received civic projects such as the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Chicago and the Washington Metro in the District of Columbia. The Washington Metro project helped Weese become the foremost designer of rail systems during the peak of his career. He subsequently was commissioned to oversee rail projects in Miami, Los Angeles, Dallas, and Buffalo. He was named a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects in 1961 and received the Arnold W. Brunner Memorial Prize from the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1964.
Weese was also well known for his firm advocacy of historic preservation and was remembered as the architect who "shaped Chicago’s skyline and the way the city thought about everything from the lakefront to its treasure-trove of historical buildings." He led the restoration of Adler & Sullivan's Auditorium Building, and Daniel Burnham's Field Museum of Natural History and Orchestra Hall. Harry Weese & Associates received the Architecture Firm Award from the American Institute of Architects (AIA) in 1978. Weese also served as a judge for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial design competition.
Major Projects
1967 - Louis Sullivan's Auditorium Building in Chicago, Illinois
1971 - The United States Embassy Building in Accra, Ghana
1971 - Time-Life Building, Chicago, Illinois
1977 - Arena Stage, Washington, D.C.
1979 - Seventeenth Church of Christ, Scientist, Chicago, Illinois
1980 - The Marcus Center for the Performing Arts in Milwaukee, Wisconsin
1980 - The Chazen Museum of Art at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, formerly known as the Elvehjem Museum of Art
1981 - The Humanities Building at the University of Wisconsin–Madison
1984 - The Upper School (high school) building of The Latin School of Chicago in Chicago, Illinois
1985 - Pierce Tower, an undergraduate residence hall at the University of Chicago
1986 - Mercantile Bank, Kansas City, Missouri
1986 - Westin Crown Center Hotel, Kansas City, Missouri
1988 - Fulton House at 345 N. Canal Street in Chicago
1989 - Fewkes Tower at 55 W. Chestnut Street (formerly 838 N. Dearborn Street) in Chicago
1989 - River Cottages at 357-365 N. Canal Street in Chicago
1990 - William J. Campbell United States Courthouse Annex in downtown Chicago (formerly known as the Metropolitan Correctional Center, Chicago)
1991 - Middletown City Building, Middletown, Ohio
1991 - Formica Building, Cincinnati
1992 - Sterling Morton Library, The Morton Arboretum
1992 - O'Brian Hall at the State University of New York at Buffalo
1995 - The Healey Library at the University of Massachusetts Boston
1996 - The Given Institute, Aspen, Colorado
1999 - St. Thomas Episcopal Church, Menasha, WI
2006 - Red House, Barrington, IL
2006 - "Shadowcliff," Ellison Bay, WI
2007 - His primary residence in Barrington, IL
2008 - Glen Lake, MI
2008 - Muskoka Lakes, ON, Canada
2010 - Wayne, IL
2015 - Evanston, IL
Weese also led numerous restoration projects including:
Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago, Illinois
Orchestra Hall, Chicago, Illinois
Union Station, Washington, DC
Awards
In 2007, the design of the Washington Metro's vaulted-ceiling stations was voted number 106 on the "America's Favorite Architecture" list compiled by the American Institute of Architects (AIA), and was the only brutalist design to win a place among the 150 selected by this public survey. In January 2014, the AIA announced that it would present its Twenty-five Year Award to the Washington Metro system for "an architectural design of enduring significance" that "has stood the test of time by embodying architectural excellence for 25 to 35 years". The announcement cited the key role of Harry Weese, who conceived and implemented a "common design kit-of-parts" which continues to guide the construction of new Metro stations over a quarter-century later.
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Pietro Belluschi
Pietro Belluschi (August 18, 1899 — February 14, 1994) was an Italian-born American architect, a leader of the Modern Movement in architecture, and was responsible for the design of over 1,000 buildings
Pietro Belluschi was born in Ancona, Italy in 1899. He grew up in Italy and served in the Italian armed forces during World War I when Italy was allied with Great Britain, France, and later the United States. Serving in the army he fought against the Austrians at the battles of Caporetto and Vittorio Veneto. After the war, Belluschi studied at the University of Rome, earning a degree in civil engineering in 1922.
Belluschi's architectural career began as a draftsman in a Portland, Oregon firm. He achieved a national reputation within about 20 years, largely for his 1947 aluminum-clad Equitable Building. In 1951 he was named the dean of the MIT School of Architecture and Planning, where he served until 1965, also working as collaborator and design consultant for many high-profile commissions, most famously the 1963 Pan Am Building. He won the 1972 AIA Gold Medal.
He moved to the United States in 1923, despite speaking no English, and finished his education—as an exchange student on a scholarship—at Cornell University with a second degree in civil engineering. Instead of returning to Italy, he worked briefly as a mining engineer in Idaho earning $5 per day, but he then joined the architectural office of A. E. Doyle in Portland, living in Goose Hollow. He remained in the U.S., as friends in Italy had cautioned him to not return home because of the rise to power of Benito Mussolini and the Fascist government.
At Doyle's office, Belluschi rose rapidly, soon becoming chief designer. After Doyle died in 1928, the firm took him into partnership in 1933. By 1943, Belluschi had assumed control of the firm by buying out all the other partners and was practicing under his own name.
In 1951, Belluschi became Dean of the architecture and planning school at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a position he held until 1965. When he accepted the position of dean and moved to Massachusetts, he transferred his office in Portland to the architecture firm Skidmore, Owings and Merrill. The move reduced his annual income from $150,000 to a salary of $15,000, but was prompted by health concerns attributable to the long hours of managing his office while still designing buildings.
Belluschi emerged as a leader in the development of American Modern architecture, with the design of several buildings reflecting the influence of the International Style and his awareness of the technological opportunities of new materials. Most important was the Equitable Building (1944–47) in Portland, Oregon: a concrete frame office block clad in aluminum, and considered the first office building with a completely sealed air-conditioned environment.
Belluschi's churches and residences differed from his commercial works. Although of Modern design, they fit within the development of the Pacific Northwest regional Modern idiom as they frequently used regional materials (particularly wood) and were often integrated with their suburban or rural sites.
Belluschi was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1952. In 1953, he was elected into the National Academy of Design as an Associate member, and became a full member in 1957. He served as a presidential appointee on the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts from 1950 to 1955. He was a Fellow in the American Institute of Architects (AIA), and was awarded the AIA Gold Medal, the highest award given by the institute, in 1972. He was awarded the National Medal of Arts by the National Endowment for the Arts in 1991 for his lifetime achievements. Belluschi was on the jury that selected the winning design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C.
After leaving MIT in 1965, he continued to work. Belluschi would design and consult on both buildings and issues surrounding urban planning. Pietro Belluschi was married first to Helen Hemmila on December 1, 1934, the mother of his two sons, Peter (b. 1939) and Anthony (b. 1941). After her death in 1962, he married in 1965 Marjorie (1920-2009). Pietro Belluschi died in Portland on February 14, 1994.
Works
555 California Street, as consultant to Wurster, Benardi and Emmons and Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, San Francisco, California, 1969
Alice Tully Hall at the Juilliard School within the Lincoln Center, New York City, 1963–1969
Baxter Hall and Collins Hall, Willamette University, Salem, Oregon, 1947
Belluschi Building, Portland Art Museum (NRHP), 1932
Bennington College Library, Bennington, Vermont, 1957–1958
Breitenbush Hall, Oregon State Hospital, Salem (NRHP)
Burkes House, Portland, 1947
Camp Namanu, Sandy, Oregon, Uncle Toby's Story House (1932), Blue Wing Lodge (1936), Guardians' Lodge (1929), Kiwanis Lodge (1931), All being restored and updated as of 2010.
Cathedral of Saint Mary of the Assumption, San Francisco (collaborating with Pier Luigi Nervi and others), 1971
Centennial Tower and Wheeler Sports Center, George Fox University, 1991
Central Lutheran Church, Eugene, Oregon, 1959
Central Lutheran Church, Portland, 1951
Chapel of Christ the Teacher, University of Portland
Chapel, River View Cemetery, Portland, 1942
Church of the Christian Union, Rockford, Illinois, 1964-1965
Church of the Redeemer (Baltimore), 1958
Clark Art Institute, with The Architects Collaborative, Williamstown, Massachusetts, 1973
Commonwealth Building in Portland
Emmanuel Lutheran Church, Longview, Washington, 1946
Equitable Building, Portland (NRHP), 1948
Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, Portland Branch, 1950
First Lutheran Church, Boston, 1954–1957
First Methodist Church, Duluth, Minnesota, 1962–1969
First Presbyterian Church, Cottage Grove, Oregon (NRHP), 1948
Goucher College Center, 1960
Hoffman Columbia Plaza, now Unitus Plaza, Portland, Oregon, 1966
Immanuel Lutheran Church, Silverton, Oregon, 1966
Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall, Baltimore, Maryland, 1978–1982
Lacamas Summer Home, Camas, Washington
Library Building (now Smullin Hall) at Willamette University, Salem, Oregon, 1938
Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall, with Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, San Francisco, 1980
Marion County Courthouse, Salem, Oregon, 1954
Murray Hills Christian Church, Beaverton, Oregon (1987–89)
One Boston Place, with Emery Roth & Sons, Boston, Massachusetts, 1970
One Financial Center, Boston, 1983
Oregonian Building, Portland, 1947
Pacific Building, Portland, 1926
Pacific Telephone and Telegraph Company Building, southern addition, Portland, 1926
Pan Am Building, Belluschi and Walter Gropius as design consultants to Emery Roth & Sons, New York City, 1963
Percy L. Menefee Ranch House, Yamhill, Oregon, 1948
Peter Kerr House, Gearhart, Oregon, 1941
Portsmouth Abbey School campus, Portsmouth, Rhode Island. Belluschi designed 14 of the 27 buildings on campus between 1960 and 1991.
Psychology Building, Reed College, Portland, 1947–1948
Public Service Building, Portland, Oregon, 1927
Rohm and Haas Corporate Headquarters, with George M. Ewing Co., Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1964
Sacred Heart Church, Lake Oswego, Oregon, 1949
St. Philip Neri Catholic Church, Portland, 1952
St. Thomas More Catholic Church, Portland, 1940
Sweeney, Straub and Dimm Printing Plant, Portland (NRHP), 1946
Temple Adath Israel, with Charles Frederick Wise, Merion, Pennsylvania, 1956–1957
Temple B'rith Kodesh, Rochester, New York, 1959–1963
Temple Israel, Swampcott, MA, 1953-1956
The Alice Tully Hall at the Juilliard School within the Lincoln Center, New York City, 1963–1969
Trinity Episcopal Church, Concord, Massachusetts, dedicated October 6, 1963
Trinity Lutheran Church, Walnut Creek, CA, 1954
University of Virginia School of Architecture, 1970
US Bancorp Tower, as consultant to Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, Portland, 1983
Woodbrook Baptist Church, 1970
YWCA building, Salem, 1954
Zion Lutheran Church, Portland (NRHP), 1950
Grady Clay
Grady Clay (1916 – March 17, 2013) was an American journalist specializing in landscape architecture and urban planning.
Clay was an honorary member of both the American Institute of Architects (AIA) and the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) and was editor of Landscape Architecture Magazine" from 1960 to 1985. He also was chairman of the jury that judged the design competition for the United States' Vietnam Veterans Memorial, was the Urban Affairs editor for the Louisville Courier-Journal, and provided a commentary segment, "Crossing the American Grain" which aired locally during National Public Radio's Morning Edition. In 1999, he was awarded the Olmsted Medal by ASLA. Clay also is a former president of the American Planning Association (formerly the American Society of Planning Officials) and was awarded an honorary doctorate by Emory University.
In an article from the July 2006 'Landscape Architecture Magazine, editor J. William "Bill" Thompson noted that Clay "once forecast that the design profession with the best information was going to dominate the others –and he wasn't at all sure that landscape architecture had the capacity to generate the best information".
Before Grady Clay was editor of LAM, most articles were written by professional landscape architects; during his tenure, many contributions were by professional writers without architecture credentials. He published Ian McHarg's ecological planning research, and covered areas that included use of native species for plantings, landscape sculpture and adventure playgrounds.
Clay grew up in Atlanta, Georgia, the son of an eye surgeon.
After 1939, Clay lived in Louisville, Kentucky, and was still actively writing and gardening. He was a founder of the Crescent Hill Community Association, a neighborhood association. Most of his professional papers went to the University of Louisville. His journals and other papers going back to 1939 are in the archives of the Loeb Library at Harvard.
Clay died in Louisville, on March 17, 2013, at the age of 96.
Publications
Close-Up: How to Read the American City 1974
Being a disquisition upon the origins, natural disposition and occurrences in the American scene of alleys ... a hidden resource 59 pages, 1978, ASIN B0006CY1F2
Water and the Landscape (as editor), 193 pages, McGraw-Hill Education (February 1, 1979), ISBN 978-0-07-036190-4
Right Before Your Eyes: Penetrating the Urban Environment, 241 pages, American Planning Association (October 1987), ISBN 978-0-918286-47-5
Real Places: An Unconventional Guide to America's Generic Landscape. 322 p., 100 halftones, 16 line drawings. 8½ × 9¼ 1994, ISBN 978-0-226-10946-6
Crossing the American Grain 2003, ISBN 978-1-884532-51-1
Garrett Eckbo
Garrett Eckbo (November 28, 1910 – May 14, 2000) was an American landscape architect notable for his seminal 1950 book Landscape for Living.
He was born in Cooperstown, New York to Axel Eckbo, a businessman, and Theodora Munn Eckbo. In 1912, the family moved to Chicago, Illinois. After Eckbo's parents divorced, he and his mother relocated to Alameda, California where they struggled financially while he grew up. After Eckbo graduated from high school in 1929, he felt a lack of ambition and direction and went to stay with a wealthy paternal uncle, Eivind Eckbo, in Norway. It was during his stay in Norway that he began to focus on his future. Once he returned to the U.S., he worked for several years at various jobs saving money so that he could attend college.
After attending Marin Junior College for a year, he enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley where he majored in landscape architecture.
While Eckbo was at Berkeley he was influenced by two of the program's faculty members, H. Leland Vaughan and Thomas Church, who inspired him to move beyond the formalized beaux-arts style that was popular at the time. The Beaux Arts-movement is defined as being carefully planned, richly decorated and being influenced by classical art and architecture. Eckbo graduated with a B.S. in landscape architecture in 1935 and subsequently worked at Armstrong Nurseries in Ontario near Los Angeles where he designed about a hundred gardens in less than a year. After working at the Nurseries, he was restless to expand his creative horizons and entered Harvard University's Graduate School of Design by way of a scholarship competition, which he won.
Beginning his studies at Harvard, Eckbo found that the curriculum followed the Beaux-Arts method and was similar to the one at Berkeley but more rigidly entrenched. Eckbo, along with fellow students Dan Kiley and James Rose resisted and began to "explore science, architecture, and art as sources for a modern landscape design." Eckbo began to take architecture classes with the former Bauhaus director Walter Gropius, who was then head of the architecture department while continuing to take classes in the landscape architecture department. Gropius and Marcel Breuer introduced Eckbo to the idea of the social role in architecture, the link between society and spatial design.
Eckbo was also influenced by the works of several abstract painters, including Wassily Kandinsky, László Moholy-Nagy and Kasimir Malevich. Eckbo would convey a sense of movement in his designs by the layering and massing of plants as inspired by the artists' paintings.
After receiving his MLA degree from Harvard in 1938, Eckbo returned to California where he worked in the San Francisco Office of the Farm Security Administration. He designed camps for the migrant agricultural workers in California's Central Valley. He applied his modernist ideas to these camps attempting to improve the workers' living environments. "The Grapes of Wrath' was our bible," he said of John Steinbeck's 1939 novel about farmers dislocated by the dust bowl. The F.S.A. was a remarkable experience because it had the really creative atmosphere a public agency can have if it's not inhibited by some frustrating force."
Those major organizational plantings of Chinese elms, cottonwoods, mulberries, sycamores and other hardy species were softened with magnolias, oaks and olives for shade and almond and plum trees for color. The landscape architect sees nothing extraordinary about going to such trouble for the dispossessed. "You were conscious of social problems that existed, and you tried to think of ways to improve them," he said.
During World War II, the agency shifted its focus to housing for defense workers. Mr. Eckbo designed site plans for 50 such settlements on the West Coast. But peace brought a different public attitude. "There were products we wanted to buy, things we wanted to do, a great outflow of energy, demand and desire. Prosperity is bad for morale," he said. "It makes us greedy."
Mr. Eckbo had a leading hand in planning what many scholars consider the postwar period's finest subdivision scheme, the 256-acre Ladera Housing Cooperative near Palo Alto. But the project was never fully realized without Federal Housing Authority financing, which was probably withheld because the community was racially integrated.
In 1940 Eckbo joined with his brother–in-law, Edward Williams to form the firm Eckbo and Williams. Five years later Robert Royston joined the firm.
In 1946 Eckbo resettled in Los Angeles to take advantage of its growing opportunities for private practice. Never a puritan, he threw himself with gusto into defining the landscape of a new American dream. "L.A. is larger, looser, a place of freer movement socially than the Bay Area," he said. "The years I spent there were the best of my professional life."
Mr. Eckbo's eagerness to experiment during the 1950s was epitomized by his theatrical Beverly Hills swimming pool design for the owner of Cole of California, the bathing suit company. The landscape architect cantilever a steel beam spanning the width of the pool to support a masonry wall and a series of concrete diving platforms that allowed models to swim under the backdrop unnoticed and then emerge like Esther Williams from the deep.
In other projects, Mr. Eckbo advanced the quintessential California mode of indoor-outdoor living, casual recreation and the flexible use of space. "In the landscape profession," Mr. Eckbo explained, "small gardens are not seen as our highest aspiration. If you can do a 50-acre park, it must be more important. But for me the private garden has always been a laboratory for developing new ideas and concepts. Any family that has a quarter-acre backyard has got a real project. Any improvement of any space is a step forward."
Many of Eckbo's gardens accompanied well known leading modernist architect housing design, including Raphael Soriano, Richard Neutra and Robert Alexander.
In 1956, the Aluminum Company of America (ALCOA) asked Eckbo to create a garden containing large amounts of aluminum, for the company's publicity purposes. Aluminum had been widely used during the war years as a component in airplane manufacture, but ALCOA was interested in promoting the metal's peacetime use as well.
In 1963 he returned to Berkeley to head the department of landscape architecture where he had been a student.
The very successful firm of Eckbo, Royston and Williams designed hundreds of projects including residential gardens, planned community developments, urban plazas, churches and college campuses.
He would eventually form the highly successful firm Eckbo, Dean, Austin and Williams in 1964, which in 1973, officially adopted the moniker, EDAW. Guided by a progressive vision of the leadership role of landscape architecture, EDAW became involved in sustainable planning at the regional scale as early as the 1960s when the firm created the California Urban Metropolitan Open Space Plan for the State.
In a period in history when suburban sprawl was ascendant, EDAW’s open space plan for the state of California was as innovative as it was provocative. The very idea of an ‘open space plan’ was a novel one. The firm drew up plans to preserve open spaces in danger of encroachment on the fringes of the greater Los Angeles-San Diego, Palm Springs, San Francisco Bay and Lake Tahoe areas. In addition to protected county, state and federal lands existing at the time, EDAW’s plan identified a further 330,000 acres for protection. In strong language, it warned against the automobile and foretold the climate crisis. "A new ethical attitude about land use is needed," intoned EDAW’s report, "in order to protect the environment for everyone’s benefit."
EDAW also began to work internationally, with projects in New Delhi, India (Lodi Park and the Ford Foundation Headquarters) and Osaka, Japan (Civic Center) among other locations worldwide. Eckbo famously said: "Design shall be dynamic, not static. Design shall be areal, not axial. Design shall be three dimensional, people live in volumes, not planes."
Growth in the firm continued apace in the 1970s and ‘80s, with new satellite offices in Alexandria, Virginia, and Atlanta, Georgia. In 1979 Eckbo left EDAW, the firm he helped to found. EDAW was acquired by AECOM Technology Corporation in 2005, whose work continuously strives to include cross-disciplinary work and link environmental and social goals to improve quality of life.
Leaving the firm in 1979, Eckbo first formed the firm Garrett Eckbo and Associates and finally Eckbo Kay Associates with Kenneth Kay. Throughout Eckbo's career he maintained his vision of the interaction of art and science to create environments that were functional and livable, while maintaining the social, ecological and cultural approach to design.
In 1964, he was elected into the National Academy of Design as an Associate member, and became a full Academician in 1994. In 1968, he signed the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War.
He received numerous awards, including UC Berkeley's College of Environmental Design Distinguished Alumnus of 1998, the American Society of Landscape Architects Medal of Honor in 1975, the Architectural League of New York's gold medal in 1950 and the American Institute of Architect's merit award in 1953. In 1970, he won an American Society of Landscape Architects' merit award for Lodi Park in New Delhi, India.
"Art emotionalizes the intellect. Science intellectualizes the emotions. Together, they bring order to nature and freedom to man," he wrote in his 1969 book, "The Landscape We See."
"Today, one finds the center of city or town only by the increasing height of buildings, the increasing clamor of lights and signs, and the increasing congestion of traffic," he wrote. "We still build temples and palaces and many other splendid structures, but they are lost in the modern urban jungle."
"Over the years I've done a lot of flying across the country," he said in an interview to Martin Filler of the New York Times, "and from an airplane it looks as if nobody knew what they were doing or where they were building. There's a near total absence of physical community in America today, no sequence of qualitative connections and experiences. What we landscape architects are about is to try to bring some intelligence to that pattern."
Mr. Eckbo's great success in doing just that is evident in the more than 1,000 highly varied schemes he produced for clients ranging from migrant farm workers in California's Central Valley to Gary Cooper in Beverly Hills. But despite his important role in creating a distinctive new style of American landscape design during the expansive postwar years—when his lively, innovative gardens were the horticultural equivalents of the architecture and furniture of Charles and Ray Eames—Mr. Eckbo is still not as widely known outside certain practical and academic architectural and landscape circles, although his students and colleagues bear testament to his teachings and humanity.
Other books by Eckbo include "Landscape for Living" and "Urban Landscape Design."
Linda Jewell, professor of landscape architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, where Eckbo taught, said Eckbo's books always contained numerous illustrations of his observations and theoretical positions. Some of the illustrations reflected actual projects, others were proposals that Eckbo thought should be real, she said. "He was always an advocate for the underclass," she said. "Everything he did had a social agenda behind it."
Eckbo died on May 14, 2000 after a stroke. He was survived by his wife, Arline, of Oakland; daughters Marilyn Kweskin and Alison Peper of Los Angeles; six grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
Selected Projects
1935: Landscape design for architect Edwin Lewis Snyder, Berkeley, CA
1938-44: Housing for migrant workers in California, Arizona and Texas
1946: Park Planned Homes (architect: Gregory Ain), Altadena, CA
1947-48: Community Homes (architect: Gregory Ain), Reseda, CA (unbuilt)
1947: Ladera Cooperative (architects: John Funk and Joseph Allen Stein), Palo Alto, CA
1948: Avenel Homes (architect: Gregory Ain), Los Angeles, CA
1948: Mar Vista Housin] (architect: Gregory Ain), Los Angeles, CA
1952: Alcoa Forecast Garden (Eckbo residence), Los Angeles, CA
1962: Long-range development plan for the University of New Mexico
1964-68: Union Bank Plaza (architect: Harrison & Abramovitz), Los Angeles, CA
1966: Fulton Mall, Fresno, California
1968: Lodhi Garden (architect: Joseph Allen Stein), New Delhi, India
1970: Tucson Community Center, Tucson, AZ
Teaching
Eckbo taught at the School of Architecture at the University of Southern California from 1948-56. Among his students was architect Frank Gehry. Gehry credits Eckbo and Simon Eisner, who taught city planning, in encouraging him to follow his "liberal political do-gooder leanings" and apply to Harvard Graduate School of Design for graduate work in city planning: "they also knew I wasn't interested in doing rich guys' houses and that I would be more emotionally inclined toward low-cost housing and planning.”
He was the chairman of the Department of Landscape Architecture at UC Berkeley from 1963-69.
Eckbo's social inquiry techniques, environmental, landscape and living teachings have continued to exert influence internationally through the practice of the firms he founded, including the large and international EDAW / AECOM and international students at UC Berkeley, such as Mexican architect and landscape architect Mario Schjetnan.
At the request of UC Berkeley's Institute of Governmental Studies, Eckbo wrote "Public Landscape," ranking architectural and planning successes and failures from the public arena.
In 1997, the UC Berkeley Art Museum mounted a "Garrett Eckbo: Landscape for Living" exhibit.
Though he gave up designing when he turned 80, he continued to write for several years after, including “People in a Landscape,'a summation of humanistic principles that at the time in the decade of the late 1990s may have seemed novel to a generation that grew up in a very different climate for design in the public realm than the social and economic transformations. Eckbo lived through the Great Depression and post war period.
Richard Howard Hunt
Richard Howard Hunt (born September 12, 1935) is an American sculptor. In the second half of the 20th century, he became "the foremost African-American abstract sculptor and artist of public sculpture." Hunt, the descendant of enslaved people brought through the port of Savannah from West Africa, studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the 1950s, and while there received multiple prizes for his work. He was the first African American sculptor to have a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 1971. Hunt has created over 160 public sculpture commissions in prominent locations in 24 states across the United States, more than any other sculptor.
With a career that spans seven decades, Hunt has held over 150 solo exhibitions and is represented in more than 100 public museums across the world. Hunt has served on the Smithsonian Institution's National Board of Directors. Hunt's abstract, modern and contemporary sculpture work is notable for its presence in exhibitions and public displays as early as the 1950s, despite social pressures for the obstruction of African-American art at the time. Barack Obama said "Richard Hunt is one of the greatest artists Chicago has ever produced."
Notable Works
Arachne (1956)
Steel Bloom, Number 10 (1956)
Hero Construction (1958)
The Chase (1965)
Harlem Hybrid (1976)
I Have Been to the Mountain (1977)
Jacob's Ladder (1978)
From the Sea (1983)
Slowly toward the North (1984)
From the ground Up (1989)
Freeform (1993)
Flintlock Fantasy or the Promise of Force (1991-1996)
Flight Forms (2001)
We Will (2005)
Swing Low (2016)
Scholar's Rock or Stone of Hope or Love of Bronze (2014-2020)
Costantino Nivola
Costantino Nivola (July 5, 1911 – May 6, 1988) was an Italian sculptor. The Museo Nivola in Orani, Sardinia, hosts the largest collection of his works.
Nivola was born and grew up in Orani, a small village in Sardinia. His family was very poor. As a young adolescent, he worked as an apprentice stonemason in the local building industry.
In Sassari, with the painter Mario Delitala, also from Orani, Nivola had his artistic start, and soon the two worked together for the decoration of some spaces in the local university.He then moved to the Italian mainland, and in 1931 entered the ISIA, the state institute for Artistic Industry in Monza, near Milan. His first official exhibitions are recorded in this period; among many works, notably he produced some xylography, a form of art that would have remained a characteristic expression of Sardinia.
Nivola then started frequenting France (and Paris in particular, where he met Emilio Lussu during his clandestinity), establishing contacts with artists from other countries. Supposedly here he first met his wife, Ruth Guggenheim.
In 1936 he entered the graphics' division of Olivetti, then one of the most important industrial firms in the nation, but in 1939, after Fascism issued racial laws, to protect his wife, he left Italy for France first and the U.S.A. later (Long Island).
Here, in 1940 he became the artistic director for "Interiors" and "Progressive Architecture". In time he became a close friend of Le Corbusier and not without his influences and reflections, Nivola defined his quite surprising technique called "sand-casting". Nivola then provided works for Olivetti showroom in New York (a famous sand-cast relief wall), Mutual Hartford INSURANCE COMPANY (Connecticut), Harvard University, McCormick Plaza Exposition Center (Chicago) and Yale University.
In 1954 Nivola became a professor and the director of the "Design Workshop" at Harvard University, while the American Institute of Graphic Arts assigned him ITS CERTIFICATE of Excellence. His academic work increased with other teachings, like in Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Den Haag, Netherlands.
In 1972 the American Academy of Arts and Letters admitted Nivola as its first non-American member. In 1978 the University of California, Berkeley gave him a chair at its Art Department.
He died of a heart attack in Southampton Hospital on Long Island, New York, in 1988.
Nivola's sand casting has been briefly described as a bas-relief sculpture in concrete. Landscape architect Michael Gotkin recently said that Nivola had taken the traditional Mediterranean essence of the ancient graffiti and translated it into modern terms. Others suggested that his work expresses a seamless integration of sculpture and architecture.
He produced murals and reliefs for (or together with) a variety of architects including Eero Saarinen, Percival Goodman, Antonin Raymond, Bernard Rudofsky, Richard G. Stein, Carl Stein and others.
James Rosati
James Rosati (1911, Washington, Pennsylvania 1911- 1988, New York City) was an American abstract sculptor.
Born near Pittsburgh, Rosati moved to New York in 1944, where he befriended fellow sculptor Philip Pavia. He was a charter member of the Eighth Street Club (the Club) and the New York School of abstract expressionists. Rosati was among the participants in the 9th Street Art Exhibition and the subsequent Stable Gallery shows. He met and became friends with painters Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline, and sculptor David Smith. He was awarded the Mr and Mrs Frank G. Logan Art Institute Prize for sculpture in 1962 and a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 1964. A 1969 show at Brandeis University lifted his career to new heights. He had other solo exhibitions and was in numerous group shows.
Rosati is perhaps best known for his sculptures in stone from the 1960s, and the stainless steel Ideogram that stood over 23 feet tall on the plaza between Towers 1 and 2 of the World Trade Center in New York City. About forty monumental pieces of sculpture are located in the United States and around the world.
Public Collections
Albright-Knox Art Gallery (Buffalo, New York)
Carnegie Museum of Art (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania)
Empire State Collection (Empire State Plaza, Albany, New York)
Grounds for Sculpture (Hamilton, New Jersey)
Honolulu Museum of Art (Honolulu, Hawaii)
Museo della Scultural Contemporanea - Matera (Matera, Italy)
National Gallery of Art (Washington, D. C.)
Whitney Museum of American Art (New York City)
Yale University Art Gallery (New Haven, Connecticut)
Hideo Sasaki
Hideo Sasaki (25 November 1919 - 30 August 2000) was an influential American landscape architect.
Hideo Sasaki was born in Reedley, California, on 25 November 1919. He grew up working on his family's California truck farm, and harvesting crops on Arizona farms. He began his college studies at the University of California, Berkeley during the time of World War II. Owing to his Japanese descent, he was forced into the Poston internment camp in Arizona. He was able to leave the camp upon volunteering to work as a farm hand in Sterling, Colorado. Soon after the war, he moved to Denver, Colorado where he met his wife, Kisa, a graduate of the University of Colorado. Sasaki then moved to the University of Colorado where he received Bachelor of Fine Arts and Landscape Architecture in 1946. In 1948 he graduated with a Master of Landscape Architecture from Harvard Design School. After graduation he returned to Illinois where he instructed for two years. For the next eighteen years, he became a professor and the chairman of the department of Landscape Architecture of the Harvard Graduate School of Design. In 1953, he founded Sasaki Associates, Incorporated in nearby Watertown, Massachusetts, where he was the president and chairman until 1980. He led the company's architects and planners in developing many noted commercial areas and corporate parks.
During his later years he lived with his family (wife and two daughters, Rin and Ann) in Lafayette, California. He died on 30 August 2000 in a hospital in Walnut Creek, California, shortly before his 81st birthday.
Sasaki helped to modernize the concepts of Landscape Architecture. He created a practical approach to designing a landscape. In his works, several characteristics are taken into account, such as the historical, cultural, environmental, and social use of the land. Sasaki became famous for developing this concept of interdisciplinary planning. In all of the sites that he developed, a balance is implemented into the design. One aspect that Sasaki Associates pays particular attention to is the environmental aspect of the land. They have taken part in creating several “green designs.” These designs are created to enhance or maintain the health of the environment. Some of the prominent examples can be viewed at the Utah State University Innovation Campus, The Virginia Biosphere, Walden Woods, and the Manulife Financial U.S. Operations Headquarters. Another facet of Sasaki's approach was the modernism that he worked into his college campus projects.
Major Projects
1957 - Foothill College, Los Altos Hills, California
1958 - Washington Square Village, Greenwich Village, New York City
1961 - Master plan for Sea Pines Resort, Hilton Head, South Carolina
1962 - Aerial view of Bell Labs Holmdel Complex, Holmdel Township, New Jersey
1962 - Bell Labs Holmdel Complex, Holmdel Township, New Jersey
1964 - John Deere World Headquarters, Moline, Illinois
1964 - One Maritime Plaza, San Francisco, California
1971 - One Shell Plaza, Houston, Texas
1977 - Urban design for Pearl Street Mall, Boulder, Colorado
1986 - Forrestal Village, Princeton, New Jersey
1990 - Waterfront Park, Charleston, South Carolina
1992 - Euro Disneyland in Paris, France
1999 - Master plan for The Arboretum at Penn State, State College, Pennsylvania
2006 - Performance Hall, Utah State University, Logan, Utah
2006 - Master plan for the Puerto Rico Convention Center District
2015 - Middlebury College Virtue Field House (donated by Ted Virtue)
Awards and Achievements
In 1961 President John F. Kennedy appointed Sasaki to the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts. He held this position until 1971, being re-appointed by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965. In 1971 he received the American Society of Landscape Architects Medal, the first person to do so. In 1973 he received the Allied Professions Medal from the American Institute of Architects. Sasaki was a member of CU-Boulder's four-member design review board for 33 years. He was Chairman of the department of landscape architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (1950-1968). He founded Sasaki Associates Inc. and was chairman and president of the board (1953-1980). He was a Juror for the Vietnam Memorial Competition in 1981, the Astronaut Memorial Competition in 1988 and the Peace Garden Competition in 1989. Sasaki was awarded the Centennial Medal for his impact on landscape architecture at the Harvard Design School, at a 1999 symposium on his work. In 1984 Sasaki was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Harry Weese
Harry Mohr Weese (June 30, 1915 – October 29, 1998) was an American architect, born in Evanston, Illinois in the Chicago suburbs, who had an important role in 20th century modernism and historic preservation. His brother, Ben Weese, is also a renowned architect.
Harry Weese grew up in this house in Kenilworth, Illinois.
Harry Mohr Weese was born on June 30, 1915 in Evanston, Illinois as the first son of Harry E. and Marjorie Weese. In 1919, the family moved to a house in Kenilworth, Illinois, where Harry would be raised. Weese was enrolled in the progressive Joseph Sears School in 1919. By 1925, Weese decided that he wanted to be either an artist or an architect.
After graduating from New Trier High School, Weese enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1933 to pursue a Bachelor in Architecture. Weese also took architecture classes at Yale University starting in 1936. Weese studied under Alvar Aalto at MIT and fraternized with classmates I.M. Pei and Eero Saarinen. As his schooling was at the height of the Great Depression, Weese eschewed studying the expensive historical revivals in favor of more affordable modern styles. In the summer of 1937, Weese toured northern Europe on a bicycle, fostering his appreciation for the modernist movement.
Upon his return to the United States, Weese was offered a fellowship at the Cranbrook Academy of Art through Eero Saarinen, whose father Eliel oversaw the school. There, he studied city planning, potter, and textiles while learning more about Modernist principles. He worked alongside other emerging Modern designers such as Ralph Rapson, Florence Knoll, and Charles Eames. Weese formed an architectural partnership in Chicago with classmate Benjamin Baldwin upon their graduation in 1940. He would later marry Baldwin's sister, Kitty.
Pentagon City Station, a typical stop on the Washington Metro, considered one of the best examples of brutalist style architecture.
Following the brief partnership, Weese joined the firm of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM). Soon after joining, however, Weese enlisted as an engineering officer in the United States Navy for World War II. Weese moved back to Chicago after the war in 1945 and rejoined SOM.
In 1947, Weese started his independent design firm, Harry Weese Associates. His first commissions, such as the Robert and Suzanne Drucker House in Wilmette, Illinois, were houses for family members and close associates. By the late 1950s, Weese began to receive major commissions. Although he continued to plan houses, Weese also received civic projects such as the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Chicago and the Washington Metro in the District of Columbia. The Washington Metro project helped Weese become the foremost designer of rail systems during the peak of his career. He subsequently was commissioned to oversee rail projects in Miami, Los Angeles, Dallas, and Buffalo. He was named a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects in 1961 and received the Arnold W. Brunner Memorial Prize from the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1964.
Weese was also well known for his firm advocacy of historic preservation and was remembered as the architect who "shaped Chicago’s skyline and the way the city thought about everything from the lakefront to its treasure-trove of historical buildings." He led the restoration of Adler & Sullivan's Auditorium Building, and Daniel Burnham's Field Museum of Natural History and Orchestra Hall. Harry Weese & Associates received the Architecture Firm Award from the American Institute of Architects (AIA) in 1978. Weese also served as a judge for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial design competition.
Major Projects
1967 - Louis Sullivan's Auditorium Building in Chicago, Illinois
1971 - The United States Embassy Building in Accra, Ghana
1971 - Time-Life Building, Chicago, Illinois
1977 - Arena Stage, Washington, D.C.
1979 - Seventeenth Church of Christ, Scientist, Chicago, Illinois
1980 - The Marcus Center for the Performing Arts in Milwaukee, Wisconsin
1980 - The Chazen Museum of Art at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, formerly known as the Elvehjem Museum of Art
1981 - The Humanities Building at the University of Wisconsin–Madison
1984 - The Upper School (high school) building of The Latin School of Chicago in Chicago, Illinois
1985 - Pierce Tower, an undergraduate residence hall at the University of Chicago
1986 - Mercantile Bank, Kansas City, Missouri
1986 - Westin Crown Center Hotel, Kansas City, Missouri
1988 - Fulton House at 345 N. Canal Street in Chicago
1989 - Fewkes Tower at 55 W. Chestnut Street (formerly 838 N. Dearborn Street) in Chicago
1989 - River Cottages at 357-365 N. Canal Street in Chicago
1990 - William J. Campbell United States Courthouse Annex in downtown Chicago (formerly known as the Metropolitan Correctional Center, Chicago)
1991 - Middletown City Building, Middletown, Ohio
1991 - Formica Building, Cincinnati
1992 - Sterling Morton Library, The Morton Arboretum
1992 - O'Brian Hall at the State University of New York at Buffalo
1995 - The Healey Library at the University of Massachusetts Boston
1996 - The Given Institute, Aspen, Colorado
1999 - St. Thomas Episcopal Church, Menasha, WI
2006 - Red House, Barrington, IL
2006 - "Shadowcliff," Ellison Bay, WI
2007 - His primary residence in Barrington, IL
2008 - Glen Lake, MI
2008 - Muskoka Lakes, ON, Canada
2010 - Wayne, IL
2015 - Evanston, IL
Weese also led numerous restoration projects including:
Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago, Illinois
Orchestra Hall, Chicago, Illinois
Union Station, Washington, DC
Awards
In 2007, the design of the Washington Metro's vaulted-ceiling stations was voted number 106 on the "America's Favorite Architecture" list compiled by the American Institute of Architects (AIA), and was the only brutalist design to win a place among the 150 selected by this public survey. In January 2014, the AIA announced that it would present its Twenty-five Year Award to the Washington Metro system for "an architectural design of enduring significance" that "has stood the test of time by embodying architectural excellence for 25 to 35 years". The announcement cited the key role of Harry Weese, who conceived and implemented a "common design kit-of-parts" which continues to guide the construction of new Metro stations over a quarter-century later.